Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

‘There, there,’ pleaded terrified Mishal. ‘Calm down. You'll have Mum up here in a minute.’

Saladin subsided, a pathetic goaty heap once again, no threat to anyone. ‘It's not true,’ he wailed. ‘What happened, happened to us both.’

‘Course it did,’ Anahita encouraged him. ‘Nobody believes those movie magazines, anyway. They'll say anything, them.’

Sisters backed out of the room, holding their breath, leaving Chamcha to his misery, failing to observe something quite remarkable. For which they must not be blamed; Chamcha's antics were sufficient to have distracted the keenest eyes. It should also, in fairness, be stated that Saladin failed to notice the change himself.

What happened? This: during Chamcha's brief but violent outburst against Gibreel, the horns on his head (which, one may as well point out, had grown several inches while he languished in the attic of the Shaandaar B and B) definitely, unmistakably, – by about three-quarters of an inch, – diminished .

In the interest of the strictest accuracy, one should add that, lower down his transformed body, – inside borrowed pantaloons (delicacy forbids the publication of explicit details), – something else, let us leave it at that, got a little smaller, too.

Be that as it may: it transpired that the optimism of the report in the imported movie magazine had been ill founded, because within days of its publication the local papers carried news of Billy Battuta's arrest, in a midtown New York sushi bar, along with a female companion, Mildred Mamoulian, described as an actress, forty years of age. The story was that he had approached numbers of society matrons, ‘movers and shakers', asking for ‘very substantial’ sums of money which he had claimed to need in order to buy his freedom from a sect of devil worshippers. Once a confidence man, always a confidence man: it was what Mimi Mamoulian would no doubt have described as a beautiful sting. Penetrating the heart of American religiosity, pleading to be saved – ‘when you sell your soul you can't expect to buy back cheap’ – Billy had banked, the investigators alleged, ‘six figure sums’. The world community of the faithful longed, in the late 1980s, for direct contact with the supernal , and Billy, claiming to have raised (and therefore to need rescuing from) infernal fiends, was on to a winner, especially as the Devil he offered was so democratically responsive to the dictates of the Almighty Dollar. What Billy offered the West Side matrons in return for their fat cheques was verification: yes, there is a Devil; I've seen him with my own eyes – God, it was frightful! – and if Lucifer existed, so must Gabriel; if Hellfire had been seen to burn, then somewhere, over the rainbow, Paradise must surely shine. Mimi Mamoulian had, it was alleged, played a full part in the deceptions, weeping and pleading for all she was worth. They were undone by over-confidence, spotted at Takesushi (whooping it up and cracking jokes with the chef) by a Mrs. Aileen Struwelpeter who had, only the previous afternoon, handed the then-distraught and terrified couple a five-thousand-dollar cheque. Mrs. Struwelpeter was not without influence in the New York Police Department, and the boys in blue arrived before Mimi had finished her tempura. They both went quietly. Mimi was wearing, in the newspaper photographs, what Chamcha guessed was a forty-thousand-dollar mink coat, and an expression on her face that could only be read one way.

The hell with you all .

Nothing further was heard, for some while, about Farishta's film.

It was so, it was not , that as Saladin Chamcha's incarceration in the body of a devil and the attic of the Shaandaar B and B lengthened into weeks and months, it became impossible not to notice that his condition was worsening steadily. His horns (notwithstanding their single, momentary and unobserved diminution) had grown both thicker and longer, twirling themselves into fanciful arabesques, wreathing his head in a turban of darkening bone. He had grown a thick, long beard, a disorienting development in one whose round, moony face had never boasted much hair before; indeed, he was growing hairier all over his body, and had even sprouted, from the base of his spine, a fine tail that lengthened by the day and had already obliged him to abandon the wearing of trousers; he tucked the new limb, instead, inside baggy salwar pantaloons filched by Anahita Sufyan from her mother's generously tailored collection. The distress engendered in him by his continuing metamorphosis into some species of bottled djinn will readily be imagined. Even his appetites were altering. Always fussy about his food, he was appalled to find his palate coarsening, so that all foodstuffs began to taste much the same, and on occasion he would find himself nibbling absently at his bedsheets or old newspapers, and come to his senses with a start, guilty and shamefaced at this further evidence of his progress away from manhood and towards – yes – goatishness. Increasing quantities of green mouthwash were required to keep his breath within acceptable limits. It really was too grievous to be borne.

His presence in the house was a continual thorn in the side of Hind, in whom regret for the lost income mingled with the remnants of her initial terror, although it's true to say that the soothing processes of habituation had worked their sorceries on her, helping her to see Saladin's condition as some kind of Elephant Man illness, a thing to feel disgusted by but not necessarily to fear. ‘Let him keep out of my way and I'll keep out of his,’ she told her daughters. ‘And you, the children of my despair, why you spend your time sitting up there with a sick person while your youth is flying by, who can say, but in this Vilayet it seems everything I used to know is a lie, such as the idea that young girls should help their mothers, think of marriage, attend to studies, and not go sitting with goats, whose throats, on Big Eid, it is our old custom to slit.’

Her husband remained solicitous, however, even after the strange incident that took place when he ascended to the attic and suggested to Saladin that the girls might not have been so wrong, that perhaps the, how could one put it, possession of his body could be terminated by the intercession of a mullah? At the mention of a priest Chamcha reared up on his feet, raising both arms above his head, and somehow or other the room filled up with dense and sulphurous smoke while a high-pitched vibrato screech with a kind of tearing quality pierced Sufyan's hearing like a spike. The smoke cleared quickly enough, because Chamcha flung open a window and fanned feverishly at the fumes, while apologizing to Sufyan in tones of acute embarrassment: ‘I really can't say what came over me, – but at times I fear I am changing into something, – something one must call bad .’

Sufyan, kindly fellow that he was, went over to where Chamcha sat clutching at his horns, patted him on the shoulder, and tried to bring what good cheer he could. ‘Question of mutability of the essence of the self,’ he began, awkwardly, ‘has long been subject of profound debate. For example, great Lucretius tells us, in De Rerum Natura , this following thing: quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit, continuo hoc mors est illius quod fuit ante . Which being translated, forgive my clumsiness, is “Whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers,” – that is, bursts its banks, – or, maybe, breaks out of its limitations, – so to speak, disregards its own rules, but that is too free, I am thinking... “that thing”, at any rate, Lucretius holds, “by doing so brings immediate death to its old self”. However,’ up went the ex-schoolmaster's finger, ‘poet Ovid, in the Metamorphoses , takes diametrically opposed view. He avers thus: “As yielding wax” – heated, you see, possibly for the sealing of documents or such, – “is stamped with new designs And changes shape and seems not still the same, Yet is indeed the same, even so our souls,” – you hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal essences! – “Are still the same forever, but adopt In their migrations ever-varying forms.”’